@reedvanschenck.bsky.social and I popped another red pill and suffered mild neurological damage by reading more Curtis Yarvin. This time, we look at his views on climate change, Keynesianism, and race - and how they are surfacing as policy.
rolfstromolsen.substack.com/p/ep-06-curt...
Rolf and I are on a roll! Everything you never wanted to know about Curtis Yarvin, the cartoonishly-evil thinker behind the tech right with even more cartoonish ideas about U.S. history.
Reed @reedvanschenck.bsky.social and I have been reading Curtis Yarvin for our podcast so you don't have to. The first part looks at all the reasons why you should be thankful for that. rolfstromolsen.substack.com/p/ep-04-curt...
"Who's city is it Chief?
Bovino: "It's our fucking city."
And that, in a nutshell, is the problem. It is not a democracy when men with guns and uniforms believe they have more control over a city than its residents.
I'm very proud to announce that "Digital Platforms and Agency" is live! Check out the special section published by Lateral, the journal of the Cultural Studies Association. My colleague Elaine and I worked very hard to curate this selection of essays.
csalateral.org/archive/sect...
Grab your free copy of "Gamer Publics," one of my recent publications about live-streamed debate and argument among gamers. www.tandfonline.com/eprint/QSI6X...
Palantir CEO Says Making War Crimes Constitutional Would Be Good for Business
I'm going live at the top of the hour to discuss queer critical challenges to/through AI on Breaking Culture! Join us www.youtube.com/@BreakingCul.... Or if you want to join the Zoom to ask a question, DM me.
In our latest podcast episode, @reedvanschenck.bsky.social and I look at Shmitt's "The Concept of the Political" and explore how his idea of the Friend/Enemy dynamic is increasingly relevant to the volatile polarization in our modern democracies. rolfstromolsen.substack.com/p/179403645?
It's finally live! Listen to "While Our Students Are Sleeping." Join me and Rolf as we dissect political theory for our students. Our first few episodes are about Carl Schmitt, trad-cath Nazi jurist. All relation to current events is strictly non-coincidential. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/w...
In IE Insights today, I write that Europe needs to de-risk from the U.S. or face a major, digitally-mediated identity crisis. www.ie.edu/insights/art...
New article just dropped! "Christian Nationalism as Media" explores how the political identity of Christian Nationalism retrieves racist and sexist ideas of the human through its obsession with owning and controlling the media. ijoc.org/index.php/ij...
Just pasted the whole book in 1 word doc. I only have to trim a minimum of 800 words! I'd like to thank my 10th grade English teacher.
They are priming themselves to lead MAGA after Trump, a kind of fascist theocracy.
Pretty crazy how "America is a legit, no bullshit fascist country" is now a NYT headline.
In 2019 Nick Fuentes' neo-Nazi "Groypers" engaged in a systematic campaign to harass Charlie Kirk at his events for not being racist enough. He responded by becoming more racist.
www.thebulwark.com/p/how-the-gr...
Check out this resource library NCA has launched! "Addressing Authoritarianism" is a resource to enable successful pedagogical, research, creative, and administrative interventions into authoritarianism and fascism. www.natcom.org/addressing-a...
Check out my review of @transform6789.bsky.social's fascinating and all-too-timely book Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism: The Origins and Afterlife of James Mason's Siege. And if that doesn't sound like too much nausea for a summer, read the book!!! www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
"This silence has made a mockery of the slogan 'Never again,' transforming its meaning from an assertion of resistance to inhumanity wherever it is perpetrated to an excuse, an apology, indeed, even a carte blanche for destroying others by invoking one’s own past victimhood."
Reed Van Schenck, comm scholar, wearing a patterned shirt, in front of a lecturn, gesturing to a PowerPoint slide featuring white nationalist content found on Telegram
Wow @reedvanschenck.bsky.social absolutely killing it on the top papers of ethnicity race & comm panel w their paper on white supremacists, Telegram, and interfaces
Ding ding ding
Both! The first sense begets the second. For instance, that the platform based web is structured like a network (but centralized in the Global North) lends itself to the silly idea that the internet is democratic, which in turn gives credence to free speech complaints.
I just signed a book contract!
The Reactionary Web is a book about why white supremacists manage to stay online, and what that teaches us about the racist conceits of the internet at large.
Coming in 2026 from @brisunipress.bsky.social
This happened a couple years ago, and the group that did it has not fared well since, but the point stands.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez on Israel,
"We do not trade with a genocidal state"
The breaking point came on July 5, 2021, when Foster and Williams, along with the never-Trump conservative David French and the liberal academic Jason Stanley, wrote a New York Times op-ed criticizing new laws against teaching “critical race theory.” “Even if this censorship is legal in the narrow context of public primary and secondary education, it is antithetical to educating students in the culture of American free expression,” they wrote. The conservatives had thought the Harper’s letter writers were their allies in an all-out ideological battle, and considered their position a betrayal. Andreessen “went really ballistic in a quite personal way at Thomas,” a participant recalled. The group ended after Andreessen “wrote something along the lines of ‘thank you everybody, I think it’s time to take a Signal break,’” another said.
The meltdown of this liberal-tech alliance was, to Rufo, a healthy development. “A lot of these technologists hoped that the centrist path was a viable one, because it would permit them in theory to change the culture without having to expose themselves to the risk of becoming partisans,” he said. “By 2021, the smartest people in tech understood that these people were a dead end — so the group chats exploded and reformulated on more explicitly political lines.” Rufo had been there all along: “I looked at these chats as a good investment of my time to radicalize tech elites who I thought were the most likely and high-impact new coalition partners for the right.”
So basically, there was a Signal chat with tech folks and some Harpers Letter writers, and the Harpers folk were chased out when Andreessen realized they would not go along with censorship. But the tech guys stuck with Chris Rufo. www.semafor.com/article/04/2...
Yes, and this has been the case for a long time. Still genuinely unsure whether I prefer the brutal honesty of the present or the duplicity of the Pelosi types.
Seems like all those tactics people have been using to diminish the value of Tesla have worked more effectively than both the legislative and judicial branches.
